PPC Roundup 7/22/11 — Smarter Keyword Research Edition

This week’s roundup focuses on tips and tricks to help you perform smarter keyword research in your PPC campaigns. If you don’t have solid keywords, you won’t grab the right customers’ attention and you’ll not only miss out on clicks, but waste valuable ad spend.

So how can you shape up your keyword research process? Read the following resources and find out!

Our first keyword-focused content comes from WordStream, who released a great infographic this week highlighting the 20 most expensive AdWords keywords. The top of the list? Insurance-related keywords, followed by loans and mortgages at second and third place. A whopping 97% of Google’s total revenue is from advertising, and with the cost-per-click attached to these terms, it’s not too hard to imagine why that might be true!

The folks over at Ace Marketing have a post on their blog this week telling readers that the best way to lead the competition with PPC is through dynamic keyword research. They urge readers to go beyond free keyword discovery tools and other online resources and remember that your industry isn’t static. Once you have a list, you can’t just let it sit there and expect it to continue to perform at its highest potential. Instead, they advise to approach keyword research dynamically by examining the trend in keyword search interests as opposed to looking at static numbers.

Elaborating on the constantly evolving nature of search, Brick Marketing’s Nick Stamoulis helps us figure out when it’s time to revisit our keyword research. As search marketers, we have to be able to adapt to change, and adapt quickly! Nick provides some sage advice for recognizing when it’s time for a keyword research refresher, and how to approach it safely and productively.

Mixing SEO and PPC in a post this week, Search Engine Land’s Brad Geddes answers the question: “Should You Bid on a Keyword if you Rank Organically for that Term?” There isn’t a constant yes or no answer, but Brad gives us tests and calculations to run to be able to assess whether it’s wise to go the paid route if a term already ranks organically.

Another great post from Search Engine Land comes from Tom Schmitz who offers some Key Principles to Follow When Examining Keyword Difficulty. The three metrics he outlines are competition, authority, and relevance, with handy charts and tips for properly assessing a keyword’s difficulty as part of your keyword research strategy.

In non-keyword related posts this week, Stephen Cobb on Search Engine Watch emphasizes the importance of proper spelling with your website, showing how typos can kill conversion rates and offering some help for avoiding misspellings, even if you think you’re a pretty good speller.

Do you identify yourself as an SEO expert? A PPC whiz? A social media maven? Himanshu Sharma shares why every SEO should know PPC in his latest blog post, showing how PPC is the best keyword research and testing tool for SEO, among other benefits.

Speaking of social media mavens, this post on FB Ads Lab shows how to make a standout Facebook fan page. Does your Facebook page stand out from the crowd using these techniques? Perhaps you don’t even have one yet. Not to worry. This post will help you get started!

And it wouldn’t be a weekly roundup without a post from PPC Hero. This week’s post that caught our eye is part of their ‘EXCELlent’ series: Using Excel to Boost PPC Performance, highlighting three different resources to help you put Excel to use in your PPC campaigns.

That’s it for this week’s roundup! Thanks for reading and as always, please leave your own posts in the comments if you have a resource from the week that we missed!